Again, there’s a whole book’s worth of content on this topic. Maybe someone’s even already done it. But just a note to myself to follow up on session 407 from SAA in DC in 2014:

In 2011 the world commemorated the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. Soon after archivists started hearing about the new disease, they began collecting materials chronicling how it was affecting communities and the response to it. Archives were striving to build holdings that include voices of diverse participants in the struggle to conquer the epidemic, including the GLBT community, volunteer organizations, researchers and clinicians, and local governments. Archivists from a variety of institutions discuss their HIV/AIDS archives.

There’s a ton of scholarship out there about the deliberate destruction of libraries and archival collections as part of a cultural genocide. Sadly, many examples. But I was reminded to make a note that this needs to be covered in the book by seeing this news story: “On the Run from the Islamic State, Iraqi Christians Are Trying to Save Their Heritage.”

“If Daesh burns down a church we can rebuild it, but the manuscripts are our history. They trace back our roots, they are part of our civilization,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. “If they get destroyed, then we are lost, and our culture will be forgotten.”

Over the past few months we have been working to make publicly available some of the sound collections that the Endangered Archives Programme has funded. Two of the first collections we worked on were EAP088: The Golha radio programmes (Flowers of Persian Song and Poetry), and the three projects that make up the Syliphone record label collection from Guinea (EAP187, EAP327 and EAP608). It is with great pleasure that we can announce that these two collections are now available on BL Sounds for anyone to listen to worldwide.

The Golha radio programmes were broadcast on Iranian National Radio between 1956 and 1979 and consist of a mixture of musical pieces, poetry and literary commentary. These programmes can be listened to here. You can read more about this project in a previous guest blog by Jane Lewisohn.

A hush may fall over the archives if you want to learn much about sex in the past, right? Again, this deserves its own chapter. (It’s going to be a big book, don’t you think?)

Here’s a fun story about a find in an antiques shop: “a photo album full of erotic imagery, from magazine clippings to postcards to early attempts at pornographic film.”

More than the subversive imagery on display, though, these images patched together a lost history of sexuality and desire, silenced under the rule of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975, during which many graphic or dissenting images were censored or destroyed.

For 10 years, Zubiaurre treasure hunted and researched similar erotic materials, eventually building a visual history of early 20th century sexuality in Spain. The X-rated treasure trove illuminates the public emergence of feminism, gay love, cross dressing, psychoanalysis, masturbation, sex manuals and hardcore porn.